Woman Killed by a Superbug Resistant to Every Available Antibiotic

[Osmeric]

Oh please, if it wasn't profitable to sell the drugs in other countries then they wouldn't do it. No one is getting a free ride. Complete bullshit.

The particular point you are clueless on is the difference between SELLING a drug and DEVELOPING a drug.

Once a drug is developed, it can be profitable to sell it for a low price. The development cost is sunk, after all, and as long as the sale is for more than the manufacturing cost, the drug maker comes out ahead on the margin. Better to get some money out of Lower Slobovia than none at all.

But for a drug to be profitable to DEVELOP, the development cost needs to be recouped as well. And not just the development cost for that drug, but the costs for the huge number of drug candidates that flamed out during the development process and never led to the marketable drug.

If drug makers could not recoup development costs, they would stop spending the money to develop new drugs.

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They're already getting the cost to develop from government grants. We are already paying for the development through our tax money. Why are we also paying for development when we buy them?

Sounds like big pharma bullshit propaganda.

Sounds like you haven't a fricking clue about how drug development actually works.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

That's a conditional statement given as part of an explanation of a response to someone who thought the Republicans were to blame.

Then you should not have brought the word "party" into it.

If you want to make it about individuals... 52 individuals caused this bill to fail. 39 of them were Republican, 13 were Democrat.

You can choose to blame the 13 democrats that voted against the bill, or the 39 republicans that did the same . Or you can split the blame proportionately.

So yes...the Democrats deserve some blame...exactly 25% of it.

The remaining 75% falls upon the Republicans

[apraxic]

If US citizens could buy from Canada there would be actual competition for US drug companies and they couldn't charge fucking retarded amounts for drugs.

US drug costs is a large part of why US health insurance is so fucking expensive compared to the rest of the developed world.

If US Citizens could buy drugs from Canada, then drugs in Canada would be more expensive. The reason that drugs are cheaper in the rest of the world is that the cost of a drug is almost entirely in the research, development, and regulatory hurdles. Pharma makes most of that money back in the United States market because in the end most of that money they make from selling drugs comes from the Federal Government, and for the purposes of Pharma, the government has infinite money. Pharma companies don't care what drugs cost in Europe or Canada, because they've already spent the money to bring the drug to market, so whatever they can sell the drugs for is just extra profit, the marginal cost per pill manufactured is essentially nothing compared to the R&D and regulatory costs (which is on the order of a billion dollars).

If American citizens could buy drugs from other markets, then all that would do is cause Pharma to start caring what drugs cost in other markets. It would drive prices down in America by normalizing prices across the global market, which means that Europeans and Canadians would start paying a lot more for drugs, which would probably suck a lot for them since they won't have the US Federal Government paying for most of the costs anymore.

You can say that pharma shouldn't be able to make any profits and that drugs are a human right and should be available to everyone for free and that's great, but then who is going to make the drugs once all of the drug companies go out of business? It takes about a billion dollars to make that drug (and if you try and cut corners on those costs you either get snake oil or thalidomide), so if that's not coming from the sales of the drug, where does that money come from?

[Direpenguin]

there are a lot of medicines not available in the US usually because theyr are cheaper than the US brands and the pharma industry lobby against their legalization, my sister has crohns and the medication they prescribed her costs a bit over $1000 a month and in Spain a very similar medicine costs 135 euro our relative trying to help sent the medicine from spain but it was returned because its illegal here in the US.

Not sure what your rant has to do with the actual question. A cheap, alternative drug to the more expensive ones they tried wouldn't have made a difference in this case. The question was what antibiotics are there, that aren't available in the US, not which cheaper substitutes are out there.

"We tried this 5000$ per dose drug, and it didn't do a thing!"
--Too bad, we don't have the 3.50$ per dose generic from Kosovo, we might have saved her life!

(said no medical professionals, ever)

[Spectral]

By way of support of what I, @Osmeric, and @apraxic are saying, here's an article Americans fretting that the United States now only spends 45 percent of the world's biomedical research dollars. American companies spend more on biomedical research than all of Europe, including public spending, put together.

So, yes, everyone benefits from American research and those that pay less for it are free-riding.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain conditional statements to you. Blame whoever you want, but getting upset with the Republicans over the Democrats who screwed up a golden opportunity is not the least bit reasonable.

I'm not getting upset. I'm pointing out that while the 13 democrats probably should have voted with the rest of their party, they are not solely responsible for the Bill failing to pass. It's just as easy to blame the 39 Republicans that didn't join with McCain, Cruz, etc. I'm not saying those democrats don't deserve their share of the blame...I'm saying it is "not the least bit reasonable" to put the entirety of the blame on them.

Looking at the issue party wise...both parties had an issue with a significant amount of members voting against party lines.

[Vizardlorde]

Not sure what your rant has to do with the actual question. A cheap, alternative drug to the more expensive ones they tried wouldn't have made a difference in this case. The question was what antibiotics are there, that aren't available in the US, not which cheaper substitutes are out there.

"We tried this 5000$ per dose drug, and it didn't do a thing!"
--Too bad, we don't have the 3.50$ per dose generic from Kosovo, we might have saved her life!

(said no medical professionals, ever)

It's not an alternative it is the same chemical trademarked in the US. And i brought it up because medicine gets approved elsewhere before it gets approved here and when it does its 8x more expensive because they have to pay for all trials to get it approved and profit.

[primalmatter]

Will just thin the herd praise nurgle

[Lenonis]

Big pharma in the US have the resources to make new antibiotics but they are reluctant to do so. Why? You make a lot more money off of something people have to take everyday for the rest of their lives like blood pressure medicine, antibiotics cure the patient and once the infection is gone, you don't need them.

This is not how the pharma industry works in reality. This is a conspiracy theory mindset people have. The reality is that the industry is so competitive the drive to create new products to get market share and steal customers from your competitors outstrips any sort of "sit on the cure we make more money otherwise" that might exist. Companies actually cannibalize their own drugs all the time with improved version. That's reality.

Holy cow -- now that I've caught up to the thread -- there are a whole bunch of people who don't have the first clue about what pharma companies do. Do any of you armchair critics have any experience in the industry or are you all just going off your favorite conspiracy website?

[Masark]

The reason that drugs are cheaper in the rest of the world is that the cost of a drug is almost entirely in the research, development, and regulatory hurdles.

Bullshit. Pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than R&D. Look at the income statements.

[Lenonis]

Bullshit. Pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than R&D. Look at the income statements.

You do realize you can both be right I hope.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

You do realize you can both be right I hope.

No. It's the internet. There's no room for compromise.

[Lenonis]

No. It's the internet. There's no room for compromise.

Well to be serious for a moment it's a question of on-time costs versus ongoing costs. R&D is a one time investment of a drug (at least until you do label expansions or next-gen research) while marketing is an on-going investment.

I suppose the real question is over the span of a drug's lifetime what are the higher costs...and I'm willing to bet that doesn't have a uniform answer. Some drugs are easy to market and have low R&D costs, others are hard to market and have high R&D costs.

Then you overlay all of this with patent laws in various countries as well as the payer/provider systems in play and how those get contracted out...and you can have a real mess trying to figure out true costs of a particular drug.

[Osmeric]

By way of support of what I, @Osmeric, and @apraxic are saying, here's an article Americans fretting that the United States now only spends 45 percent of the world's biomedical research dollars. American companies spend more on biomedical research than all of Europe, including public spending, put together.

So, yes, everyone benefits from American research and those that pay less for it are free-riding.

And even foreign drug companies are usually depending on the US market to justify their research spending.

If the US wanted to crack down on free riding, they could invalidate US drug patents from foreign companies that sell to countries that negotiate down drug prices from US companies. This would eviscerate most of the rest of the world's drugmakers.

[apraxic]

Bullshit. Pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than R&D. Look at the income statements.

From context, its pretty clear that I'm talking about up front R&D and approval versus the marginal cost of the production of each extra dosage of drug. The marketing costs are irrelevant because, unlike development and regulatory costs, marketing is a purely business decision - if it wasn't worth the return on investment to pay for marketing, companies just wouldn't pay for marketing. Clearly it is, so they do, but that doesn't significantly affect the differences in cost between America and Europe.

The ratio of R&D versus marginal production costs is what makes it profitable to sell the drugs for cheap in Europe - most of the money to make the drug is already a sunk cost, so essentially whatever they can sell it for will turn them a profit. Obviously they will try and sell it for as much as they can in Europe and Canada because duh, but it's not worth missing out on sales in an entire market to try and get American prices out of European governments. This only happens because they're recouping most of their costs and making most of their profit from the blank check that is U.S. Medicare/Medicaid paying the inflated American prices. If you change this by allowing Americans to pay the non-American prices, then all of a sudden it becomes both worth it and actually necessary to set the European price at a level that most European governments won't or can't pay in order to make money in America.

[DrStiglit]

Every antibiotic available in the US.
That was not clarified further, but that makes me wonder.
What is this antibiotic not available in the US.

Any samples provided for the test that were free or low cost were not used because clearly those would not be available in the US.

[Powerogue]

It's rather nonsensical to blame "Big Pharma" when the issue is with people not finishing their antibiotics, leaving enough survivors to reproduce and become a more dangerous, antibiotic-resistant variant.

I wish I could find the video I saw earlier that basically had layers of increasing concentration of antibiotic and you could watch as the bacteria made their way through, layer by layer via natural selection, until they were thriving in the highly concentrated antibiotic in the center.

[Deleted]

It's rather nonsensical to blame "Big Pharma" when the issue is with people not finishing their antibiotics, leaving enough survivors to reproduce and become a more dangerous, antibiotic-resistant variant.

My friend does this. She had a urinary tract infection that she got antibiotics for and she stopped it as soon as she was without symptoms only for it to come back and she did the same thing again. I honestly don't know why people refuse to follow what their doctor say, they've been very meticulous about taking it for the duration it's prescribed for and not skip some day or end it earlier than they said.

[Daedius]

This is dangerous nonsense. You should be ashamed for having written it.

This is really silly.

Yeah, you keep thinking that... meanwhile said Pharmaceuticals are all run by business men with zero medical backgrounds that are purely in it for profit. The 600% price hike on the Epipen for one such example by a CEO earning $18m per year, by a company that has given $300m as compensation to past executives...

Even Charity research by donations a large chunk of it goes straight to their pockets.

Absolutely corrupt sector.

[xindralol]

This is what we get for retards not knowing how to use antibiotics properly.

In third world countries it's often a cost issue. Even with conservative/ideal use resistances will eventually develop. Either way it's only a matter of time so we just need to continue the research for new antibiotics before it's too late.